No shit: how I lost my one-of-a-kind collection and my girlfriend, too

by E Wayne Ross on February 6, 2009

Times Higher Education Supplement: No shit: how I lost my one-of-a-kind collection and my girlfriend, too

For his PhD, Daniel Bennett had built a unique set of faecal samples from a rare lizard. When it was destroyed, he really hit bottom

To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard shit, but to me it represented seven years of painstaking work searching the rainforest with a team of reformed poachers to find the faeces of one of the world’s largest, rarest and most mysterious lizards. I didn’t realise just how much my bag of lizard shit meant to me until it was “accidentally” incinerated at the University of Leeds early in the third year of my PhD.